We study the social interaction of non-smokers and smokers as a sequential game, incorporating insights from social psychology and experimental economics into an economic model. Social norms a®ect human behavior such that non-smokers do not ask smokers to stop smoking and stay with them, even though disutility from smoking exceeds utility from social interaction. Overall, smoking is unduly often accepted when accommodating smoking is the social norm. The introduction of smoking and non-smoking areas does not overcome this speci¯c ine±ciency. We conclude that smoking bans may represent a required (second-best) policy. smoking policy, health, social norms, guilt aversion, social interaction

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The role of equity in the transition from egalitarianism to capitalism

Rutten, Koen(Frederiksberg, 2010)

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The ‘Scientific Development Concept’, promulgated by Hu Jintao in 2007 articulated the increased eminence of social development in official ideology. The shift from political and economic objectives towards social factors can be explained by growing concerns over the current negative externalities of China’s economic growth, the long and midterm sustainability of its economic development model and the implications thereof for social stability and political legitimacy. An immediate priority has been to formulate and implement a response to mitigate the disruptive effects of the transition to a market economy. Such a response must cover a wide array of social issues, ranging from provision of health, education and infrastructure, pension to unemployment insurance and poverty alleviation. The welfare issue is characterized by high degrees of complexity and interdependency between endogenous factors and exogenous political and economic variables. Improvements are further confounded by the high decentralization of administration, regional disparities and the sheer size of operations. Although progress has been made on most fronts, it remains to be seen whether recent initiatives will prove sufficient to meet China’s social challenges. In this paper, I provide a summary of the academic literature on post-reform development of the welfare system. I will give an overview of its most salient problems, initiatives and their preliminary outcomes. Finally, I will present some concluding remarks and provide suggestions for future research.

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A Single User-Action Solution to Creating, Tagging, Geo-Coding, Archiving, Sharing, and Streaming of Digital Artifacts, Objects, and Content

Vatrapu, Ravi; Joseph, Sam(Frederiksberg, 2009)

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The Socio-Spatial History Recorder system provides a one-stop single-user action solution to creating, tagging, geo-coding, archiving, sharing and streaming of digital artifacts. Users of this solution will no longer need to perform intermediary actions to edit, prepare, and publish their digital artifacts to the Internet or their social networks. For example, in the case of digital still images, this system offers a one-click solution to sharing a digital artifact. An user can shoot a picture, geo-code the picture, display the picture in a mapping application, and share it with another user all by one and only one shutter click on the digital still image capturing device. Social sharing rules and rights can be set up in advance or dynamically configured and the digital artifacts can be encrypted if desired or required. Practical uses of this system in the social domain include unobtrusive social sharing of digital artifacts embedded in their rich interactional contexts. Practical uses are also in application domains that require or would benefit from unobtrusive collection of rich ecological data without disrupting and/or interrupting the user's primary activity cycle.

This paper analyses the historical ‘direct’ soft power of American missionary universities in China and their ‘reverse’ soft power towards American society until their nationalization in the early 1950s. The paper also addresses the soft power of the legacies of these historical universities. This analysis is based on the cases of St. John’s University, Yale-in-China and Yenching University.
American missionary universities were founded with the clear ‘direct’ soft power purpose of attracting the Chinese ‘other’ to Christianity. However, soft power resources often have unintended behavioral consequences and a particularly interesting one is ‘reverse’ soft power: Where the intended object society of soft power influences the originator society of soft power, for example, through education and advocacy. American missionary universities exercised substantial soft power both toward the Chinese host society and toward the American society. The institutions in China also left institutional legacies at American—and Canadian—universities which continue to hold soft power in the relationship between American and Chinese society. The extent and limitation of this bidirectional soft power can be discerned from what attracted different actors to these universities and what those and other actors rejected about these universities; this is based on a detailed analysis of the relations between the universities and different public and private actors in the host society and the society of origin. These relations were characterized by the role of the universities as bridges between host society and society of origin carrying much information between societies, raising awareness and interest about the other society, moving elite-level human resources back and forth and raising large financial resources in the USA for education and research in China.

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The democratic deficit in the so-called bargaining democracy provides the
motivation for constitutional efforts to limit the ability of different groups to form
coalitions that are able to grant benefits to themselves through legislation that more
or less directly benefit identifiable groups. A constitutional hierachy of laws that
stand in conflict is proposed. In this hierarchy more "rule-oriented" legislation
dominate less "rule-oriented" legislation. The main purpose of the proposal is to
create a momentum of the political process towards more rule-oriented policy
actions and legislation, and to inspire the policy debate to focus on principles and
rules to an increasing extent. At the same time, the difficulty of defining a rule as
opposed to an outcome-oriented directive is avoided by limiting the task of a
constitutional court to simply rank conflicting policy actions with respect to the
degree actions satisfy criteria for rules.

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The Songs+Spaces system supports dynamic song selection and visualization based on the digital artifacts associated with a particular location. Songs+Spaces allows the user to select between different channels that filter out sets of digital artifacts associated with their current location. The Songs+Spaces system chooses songs based on user (self or other) preferences, geo-coded photos, videos, text annotations, and graphics associated with a particular place and uses them to provide visual accompaniment on the screen of a personal media player or heads up display. This application makes use of GPS or other location based services, and will run on any device that has access to such services

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Abstract: This article analyzes the conflict of interests between shareholders and
other stakeholders, including when such conflicts of interests may arise. It is argued
that shareholder value cannot be justified simply by referring to any prerogative
property rights of the shareholders. Instead, shareholder value coincides with the
efficient hypothetical perfect contract. However, due to contractual failures in certain
bargain situations, management may be unable to "internalize the firms externalities".
This means that in these situations there is a tradeoff between a broad duty of loyalty
for management in listed firms and other traditional remedies. The theoretical insights
are applied on a case from the Danish Supreme Court (Louis Poulsen A/S) where the
interests of the stakeholders were decisive. However, it is shown that the verdict may
instead harm the relevant stakeholders illustrating how cautious the legal system
should use a doctrine based on the "company’s interests". In addition, the notion of a
firm’s social responsibility is critically evaluated together with the associated pitfalls
of accepting this concept.

This article examines the role of the state in development, and the question of poverty, inequality and regional disparity in selected ASEAN countries Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines in the context of both internal and external pressures faced by the state and how its responds to them. This article examines the historical context of the socioeconomic transformation, the current state of development, the high level of poverty in these countries (except Malaysia), the pervasive inequality and regional disparity, the various internal and external pressures exerted on the state and the latter’s response to them. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of appropriate state policies for inclusive development and the role of civil society to exert pressure to ensure states perform such tasks. It argues that these issues are a result of state policies and institutional arrangements, and that to resolve them, appropriate inclusive policies need to be crafted and effectively implemented. The state has the autonomy and space to devise such policies but it is dependent on the political will of state actors and the role of civil society in engaging with the state to effect such reforms to address poverty, inequality and regional disparity effectively.

Offshore outsourcing of business activities from the Global North to the Global South does not only relocate investments and jobs, but has also brought about new business demands on suppliers activities and their social and environmental impact. The article explores whether, how and why offshore outsourcing transactions between foreign firms and Malaysian firms affect the upgrading of the CSR activities of Malaysia incorporated firms, taking the particular institutional context of Malaysia into consideration. The focus is on recipient country vendors, contract manufacturers or subcontractors and their reception of and strategising about corporate social responsibility. The findings of the study indicate, firstly, that the amount of foreign (sub)contracting influences the CSR strategising of domestic firms while the global value chain position is only conditioning the offshore outsourcing portfolio. Secondly, both the corporate governance of Malaysian affiliate and the Malaysian government play an important role shaping the perception, rhetoric and organisation of CSR activities by firms in Malaysia with a domestic value chain position. Hence, firms in Malaysia are squeezed by international business linkages and the local institutional context.

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CSR is a rising phenomena in Afghanistan – but why are firms concerned about CSR in a
least-developed context such as Afghanistan, and what are the strategic benefits? This paper is one
of the first to explore these CSR issues in a least-developed country. It does so by focusing on CSR
in the Afghan telecommunication sector and in particular on ‘Roshan’ as a case company. The findings
of this paper are two-folded. First, it provides an overview of the CSR practices in the telecommunication
sector in Afghanistan. Second, it focuses on one case and explains whether Roshan
can gain strategic advantages through CSR in Afghanistan, and if so which and how these strategic
benefits are gained. The paper shows that the developmental challenges of Afghanistan are the key
explanations for why companies engage in CSR. Roshan has engaged in proactive CSR to overcome
the contextual barriers for growth. Based on an analysis of five CSR projects, it can be assessed
that Roshan enhances its competitive advantage through CSR in internal, external, and wider-
society levels. It is analyzed that Roshan influences its competitive context both from inside-out
and out-side in dimensions, and that the CSR projects could all live up to the strategic CSR criteria
drawn from the academic work of Porter and Kramer, Burke and Logsdon and Blowfield. Finally,
the paper discusses how in a context of a weak state and civil society, and massive developmental
challenges, CSR is not a matter of an ‘add-on choice’, but is based on a ‘license to operate’ motivation,
where businesses have free room for maneuvering CSR towards their strategic priorities and
business goals. Whether this creates a ‘shared value’ for both business and in particularly for the
society is however still questionable.

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Current changes in business conditions may increase interest in environmental scanning and external analysis within the area of corporate strategy. Thus, strategic forecasting is gaining prominence. Strategic forecasting can be defined as the area of business economics that deals with the study and the practical application of methods, theories, models and techniques for long-term analysis of the non-proximate environment of the firm with the purpose of conducting strategic innovation. This paper distinguishes strategic forecasting from other analytical approaches and develops its theoretical basis. Finally, challenges in future theoretical development and implications for business economic theory and practices are elaborated.

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The long term tendencies for the EU economic development is not particular prosperous. The reason
is found in the fact that both the GDP in the EU countries in relation to the world GDP as well
as the size of the EU population in relation to the world population are decreasing. This implies
relatively lower incomes in the EU and a change in the average age of the population with relatively
more elderly people and an increased need for public services and a relatively smaller labor
force. This long term development is also distinctive for the development in the Baltic Sea Region
countries. The development implies that more export to the rest of the world as well as more
tourists coming from the rest of the world to the EU should be on the main EU political agenda as
well as on the agenda for the Baltic Sea countries. It is simply needed if the Baltic Sea Region countries
shall continue to have an economic development with economic growth.
The economic and financial crisis since September 2008 has deepened the problematic situation. It
was seen in the press release after the G20 meeting in June 2012. Here, tourism was mentioned
for the first time by the G20 countries and it was stressed that tourism development worldwide
has to be given priority, as a policy to create jobs and to create economic growth as well as a recovery
policy (WTTC, 2012). Tourism in this context includes transportation, shopping, attractions
and events, accommodation and meals, i.e. all elements in leisure and business tourism.
EU had already given more attention to tourism by including tourism in the Lisboan Treaty, approved
during 2007 and ratified in 2008. Part One of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European
Union provides that tourism falls within those actions designed to ‘support, coordinate or supplement
the actions of the Member States’, i.e. within the EU’s powers to support the Member
States (Article 6(d)).
The new legal basis (Article 195, Part 3) develops this concept, by stipulating that the Union shall
complement the action of the Member States in the tourism sector, in particular by promoting the
competitiveness of Union undertakings. There is thus no standalone European policy on tourism;
instead, the EU tries to encourage a favorable framework for economic development and facilitate
cooperation between Member States in that area, through the exchange of good practices.

The role of transaction cost economics in developing research in strategy has been a hotly debated topic over the last decade. This paper presents the radical argument that transaction cost insights are more than merely useful complements to existing approaches to strategy. Rather, they are necessary for adequately understanding the nature of strategizing. This is because transaction costs are essential aspects of processes of creating, capturing and protecting value. If transaction costs are zero, these processes do not pose any strategic problems; strategizing is trivialized in such a world. When transaction costs are positive, on the other hand, opportunities for value creation through the reduction of inefficiencies caused by transaction costs exist, and protecting and appropriating value are costly activities that dissipate value. Also, contracting and expectations enter as central aspects of strategizing. Arguments are provided for why economizing (with transaction costs) is more fundamental than strategizing (in the sense of exploiting market power). Thus, the paper argues that models in which the fullest possible account of transaction costs is made be used as the proper foundations and benchmarks for economics-based strategy research, rather than the patched-up competitive equilibrium models that are now used, more or less implicitly, as the benchmark in important parts of strategy research, most notably in the resource-based view.

Over the past decade, the Government of Malaysia has become increasing aware of the significant contribution of small medium enterprises (SMEs) to the national economy. A number of Government programmes and incentives were offered to the SMEs in the past years but with limited impact. This lecture touches on the nature and contribution of the Malaysian SMEs in the first five years of the 21st century. An attempt was made to identify the success factors and weaknesses of SMEs from official reports of Government agencies, and findings of research studies on the subject. Recognising the challenges posed by globalisation and trade liberalisation on the Malaysian SMEs, the Government revamped its policies, programmes, incentives, and approaches which are currently implemented in the Ninth Malaysian Plan and the Third Industrial Master Plan. The objective is to enhance the SMEs’ capacity and capabilities through continuous product development, knowledge and technology acquisition to empower them to compete with other global players offering high quality products and services at competitive prices.